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Jaap van Zweden’s visceral manner of music-making and fastidious attention to detail would seem ideally suited to Mahler. So would his remarkable command of form and trajectory in both micro- and macrocosm. Now in his sixth season as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, he has the group playing with amazing power and finesse.

He and the orchestra certainly proved their Mahlerian bona fides last week, in a gripping account of the Fourth Symphony. Alas, this recording of the Sixth feels surprisingly cautious, even uptight, with too little room for breath and stretching sinews. Contrived recorded sound doesn’t help.

Van Zweden’s tendency to micromanage the smallest details in performance is usually a good thing: a welcome change from the generic music-making heard from so many other conductors. Here’s a guy who actually has ideas about the music, who has thought about every single note and its significance. There’s not a measure on auto-pilot.

To his credit, at least from my viewpoint, van Zweden favors Mahler’s original order of the middle movements — scherzo then slow movement — rather than the composer’s subsequent reordering. But van Zweden seems more concerned with getting everything technically just so and less with Mahler’s dramatic command of tension and relaxation. The trio sections of the scherzo are strangely stiff-kneed; the slow movement is pretty businesslike, lacking tenderness, let alone ecstasy.

The orchestral playing is world-class, with particularly fine solos from Gail Williams (filling in as principal horn) and Christopher Runk (bass clarinet), but the performance as a whole just doesn’t quite catch fire.

A little history, and some technical notes: Van Zweden and the orchestra performed and recorded the piece in the Meyerson Symphony Center in March 2011. The recording was all ready to go, but after the orchestra repeated the piece four months later at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival in Colorado, van Zweden thought the playing had improved enough to repeat and re-record the piece in Dallas. This happened last March, after which the DSO took it on its European tour.

This time, rather than using the fine in-house recording engineers, Roy Cherryhomes and George Gilliam, the DSO brought in Keith O. Johnson, something of a cult figure in audiophile circles. Alas, Johnson may have been out of his league with such a vast and multilayered score. Sonic results are vivid, but strangely unnatural.

The use of too many microphones tends to flatten the perspective, and instruments seem to exist in isolated spaces, not in the warm wash of the Meyerson’s acoustics. Individual instruments and sections advance and recede in sometimes arbitrary balances. Trumpets tend to sound as if playing through a table radio. The two (not three) hammer blows are awesome, but I never did hear the cowbells that are such a distinctive feature of the instrumentation.

This recording will be distributed internationally by Naxos starting Oct. 29. It will be available Friday from the Symphony Store in the basement of the Meyerson.

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s recording of Steven Stucky’s “August 4, 1964″ has been nominated for a Grammy award. The “concert drama,” with a libretto by Gene Scheer, was commissioned by the DSO and recorded in May 2011. A tribute to the memory of President Lyndon Johnson, it recounts two parallel courses of events on the eponymous date: the decision to begin bombing North Vietnam, thus escalating the Vietnam War; and the discovery of bodies of three slain civil rights workers in Mississippi.
The recording also includes soloists Indira Mahajan, Kristine Jepson, Vale Rideout and Rod Gilfry, with the Dallas Symphony Chorus, with music director Jaap van Zweden conducting. Recorded in the Meyerson Symphony Center by the DSO’s in-house sound engineers, George Gilliam and Roy Cherryhomes, the CD was issued on the DSO Live label and is distributed by Naxos.
The Grammy Awards ceremony will be held Feb. 10, 2013 at Staples Center in Los Angeles and will be broadcast live by CBS from 7 to 10:30 p.m. Central Time.